The Importance of a Mentor

Becky has 20 years’ experience in engineering and construction and has been a qualified Project Manager for over five years and a qualified performance coach for over 10 years. She has been involved in public speaking since one of her managers put her in front of 600 men and told her she had 20 minutes to teach them how to do their job properly. Becky is known for her use of humor to challenge status quo thinking and offering alternative views for consideration. She is motivated to pass on her lessons learned to assist and educate the next generation of leaders to become high achievers like herself.

Mentoring is about other people. Genuinely, honestly, and completely. There should be no self interest in a true mentor.

There is always secondary gain to being of service to people, but it should be exactly that – secondary to the people you work with, otherwise you are a manager, or a dictator, not a mentor. And dictators need not apply.

Mentoring
takes a special set of skills that can’t be taught in a classroom, although I
am sure that a degree in Mentoring is not far away, if not already in place
somewhere.

The skills that make for a good mentor are included in the following list. Perhaps not all, but certainly more than one of these skills apply if you want to be a good, or even great, mentor.

The
skills that make for a good mentor are included in the following list. Perhaps not all, but certainly more than one
of these skills apply if you want to be a good, or even great, mentor.

Experience – a
broad range of skills and abilities in many areas that you can vary and apply
to each set of circumstances. You don’t
use the same process every time you are faced with a challenge. You have tried and tested many ways of
solving problems during the course of your own career.

Problem
solver
– see above. You enjoy a challenge and
see it as a goal to overcome the problem, in fact see it as an
opportunity. You don’t complain about
how hard it is, you just get to it and get it sorted.

Giving – you enjoy offering your skills and services to others and don’t seek reward. You like reward, don’t get me wrong, but it is not the first thing you think of when you observe a situation that you can assist with, improve, solve or add value to.

Communication – a very tricky one. The biggest downfall of most peoples’ communication is talking to others in the language they use, not the language the other party uses. This causes failure, confusion, and misinterpretation which can sometimes lead to disastrous results. An example might assist. If you are building a high tech facility, do you use emoticons to demonstrate the outcomes you want or do you use technical language? This might be a slightly exaggerated example, but it offers the point that the delivery must be understood by the person receiving the information, not simply to show how many big words (or emoticons) the person making the delivery has access to

I can offer you a blue sky concept that encapsulates a paradigm shift via a panel based approach

OR

I can offer you an alternative solution that will engage all your team members and encourage maximum participation and uptake of the concept.

Who would you choose from those two statements? And yet they offer a similar meaning.